Why You're Still Stuck at Your Revenue Ceiling

[00:00:00] Nick: Why do you feel stuck? And what does really stuck mean in your business? Do you get up every day and think about who you're gonna be in front of, your great clients? How are you gonna reach out to your new prospects? Do you think about, oh my goodness, like how my team is supporting me. I've got a great fulfilling team that can help me through my day.

[00:00:25] Nick: Where-- how do you feel about where things are? Like it's a good starting point 'cause it's easy just to get into your day and really go on autopilot, right? And you know, we're here to drive revenue, create great businesses, impact people, make a bunch of money. Let's be clear. And so you might say, "Well, what difference does it matter how I feel about it?"

[00:00:46] Nick: Well, it makes all the difference because you take yourself wherever you go, and we've got to look at these things as a collective. If so, if you're struggling or feel like you're struggling to, to get through that next plateau, maybe the numbers you've been hitting are good, maybe they're great, but maybe they're stuck a little bit, and maybe you feel like it's all on you, and it's all getting pulled from you Breaking through that next ceiling, we've really got clear about-- get clear about what is the right problem that we need to be working on.

[00:01:16] Nick: And see, this is what happens is that we tend to just do things for inertia, the things that are most, uh, that we continue to do, have done before. And so of course we run patterns and patterns and patterns, like humans are fantastic at running patterns. This is how we learn things. If we had to relearn things all the time, uh, we'd never get anything done.

[00:01:36] Nick: If you had to learn every day to brush your teeth, you, you'd never get anything else done because you're constantly relearning. So pattern creation is really, really important, and it will happen automatically. And so we've got to be really aware, as one of my clients says, you've got to be really on purpose about what we're doing and how we're moving forward.

[00:01:53] Nick: Because think about this, right? Can I... I love this description of in your mind, uh, it's like a forest, uh, and, and that forest has like certain paths through it to get to the outcomes on the other side of the forest, the other side of your mind, or the intellect you want or the outcome that you want to get to.

[00:02:08] Nick: And in your, in your forest, in your mind, those, those paths, uh, are the path of least resistance because they already exist. But if you've got a machete in your hand, like, and you can see that you can start to use that machete and cut down some more stuff, you might be like, "Ah, let's just take the path that's already kind of pushed down and ready to go."

[00:02:26] Nick: Creating a new path is, is more challenging to get down as well. And so it's worth thinking about that in that context every day. The more that you're on autopilot, the more that you're just gonna follow the path that already exists. And so if you're thinking about what you need to break through, and maybe that's a number, that's a revenue target, it's a GDC, it's a production credits, or it's an AUM number, whatever that might be, first things first, you got to understand like, where is my constraint?

[00:02:52] Nick: Is my constraint me? Yes. The constraint is always you. As an owner, you are always the bottleneck in your business. You're always the bottleneck in your business. Either your skill set, uh, or your capacity, or a combination of those, we're always gonna be the bottleneck. So a great place to start, because we know it has to come through us to understand, like what is the next thing to get to.

[00:03:20] Nick: And you might think you're working on the most important problem right now in your business, but are we really clear about that? Because we know that we're running these patterns. All right, so let's take a step back and say, "Okay, if I know that I'm the biggest bottleneck, I'm likely to be doing the things I've done before because they're set in the patterns.

[00:03:35] Nick: Okay, what am I tr- clearly trying to achieve right now?" I'm trying to break through to that next revenue target. Trying to get to that s- next s- seven-figure level for your revenue that's incoming for your, for your business. Okay, so right now that where, where... what's the challenge? Are, are we, are we really clear on our measurements?

[00:03:53] Nick: Are we really clear on what we're tracking? Now, in financial services, we like numbers, and so we wanna... Oftentimes we are doing the right tracking, uh, but we wanna be clear about like, hey, is the tracking running us or are we running it? And like anything else, like tracking nothing is not a good idea, but also tracking everything isn't either.

[00:04:11] Nick: And so what's our sweet spot for what now, right now? Because what's worked before may not work now because you're in a different spot. Uh, I hear that a lot with advisors, right? "Oh, I used to do this real tracking and, and tightness on my tracking when I was just getting started. Guess what? It worked really well.

[00:04:28] Nick: And then I felt like I was off the ground and I was going and I was established as an advisor, as a planner, I stopped doing it because the flywheel was going and it felt like I didn't have enough time to do that stuff." We've got to come back to the basics and be really clear around, okay, is my capacity a constraint?

[00:04:47] Nick: Well, how am I-- I know. Okay, well, how many meetings do I want to run a week? What does that look like? How are my meetings set up? What's my total capacity for amount of wee- meetings this week? If you're an advisor, that can be between eight and 20 a week, maybe four and 20 a week, depending on where you are and what's most important to you.

[00:05:06] Nick: More than 20 a week, I haven't found really anyone that's doing that successfully, sustainably without their head exploding. Now, we're not talking about sprints here. We're looking about consistency, creating some averages, creating some understanding of what is really true in our businesses. And so what is your number?

[00:05:23] Nick: And maybe you don't know for sure, but let's start out with having just a quarter's worth of understanding around just tracking how many meetings am I actually having in a given week. Because let me tell you, what I expect that you might say will be something other than what actually is true. You might feel like you're averaging 12 meetings a week, but it might be more like seven.

[00:05:45] Nick: And if you think about that, uh, it's a far lot less, and that totals up at the end of the year for much less meetings, and therefore much less conversions, closing meetings, and revenue-driven impact completed. So I'd say first things first, to really try to understand where the constraint might be is understanding, is it my capacity?

[00:06:03] Nick: So how many meetings am I running? What does it look like? There. And then you got to think about, okay, where does-- what's the system look like in my business in order to create those meetings? So if I'm going to a conference, which is important, or I'm going to visit a client, or I'm going on vacation, and I come back, am I always thinking, "Argh, who's booking my 12 meetings this n- this next coming week?"

[00:06:23] Nick: Or I've got to compensate for that because I know I'm the one that's booking the meetings. Or my team is doing some of it, but not enough. Or my expectations on my team is that they're booking all of them, but actually they're not booking any of them. Or they're doing a small amount, but if I ask them, if I said, "Hey, assistant.

[00:06:41] Nick: Hey, office manager, what's your goal for booking meetings on the week for their founder?" And they might say, "I don't know, I just book meetings, whatever they ask me to do." So really important to think about, is there clarity in that communication? So to understand what-- to break through the next place, we've got really got to understand where the bottleneck is.

[00:07:01] Nick: We know it's gonna come from, from us as owners. So one clear focus to be-- to understand that is, okay, what does our capacity look like? And when we understand our own capacity, we can start to make the moves to, to allow us to leverage it in the most appropriate way so we can break through that next level.